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Janet Weaver, former dean of Poynter and now managing editor of the Tampa Tribune

Julie Moos, Poynter's online news editor

Mike Cutler, news director at NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tenn.

Preparing for 10 years down the road

What were you doing professionally in 1993?
That's what Karen F. Brown Dunlap, president
of The Poynter Institute, asked conference
participants. Then she asked them to consider how
technology has changed their work life in the decade since.
Editors quickly came up with laptops, personal computers,
pagination and the proliferation of cell phones. Such
technology not only has made it nearly impossible to clock
out of the office, as one editor said, but also has changed
the way news is gathered and processed.

Now consider newsgathering in 2013.

Dunlap's fellow panelists suggested that in the next 10
years, the news business would change just as dramatically.
As immediate as today's news is, the news cycle will
grow more intense, suggested Janet Weaver, who was dean
of the Poynter faculty at the time of the conference and is
now managing editor of the Tampa Tribune.

"The 24-hour news cycle will be something we don't
even think about any more," Weaver said. "In a lot of
newsrooms it's already here, and it will be in a newsroom
near you very soon if it isn't already."

Newsrooms will become more collaborative, producing
news and information instead of producing pages, she
said. The lines dividing print, online and television staffs
are already "starting to blur," she said. "In a lot of operations,
the walls are going to fall."

"Loyalty is going to change," she said, suggesting that
as their lifestyles evolve, news consumers increasingly will
turn to alternative sources of information. Specific news
from specialized sources will matter more to them than
the generic brand of a newspaper or television station.

Print operations aren't the only news organizations
looking for a broad delivery system. Mike Cutler, news
director of News Channel 5 (WTVF) in Nashville, said
his company owns the local cable news outlet as well as
a Web site. "Our goal ultimately would be wherever you
look for news, you'll run into News Channel 5," he said.

Conference participants had their own predictions:

Wireless delivery could replace newspapers and
televisions as access expands to the nearest computer.

Reporters will carry cell phone-size cameras as news
cycles disappear. News will be reported instantly by
journalists who can serve all media.

Staffing will be flexible, "morphing" into whatever
team is needed for the story of the hour. Another
approach driven by economics might see a two-member
team - a word reporter and a visual reporter - covering a story for all news platforms in a company.

Committing financial resources to technological development
is difficult, Moos said, when no one knows which
technology will be needed in 10 years. Dunlap raised
another question: If news is instantaneous, how do we
maintain quality? Weaver agreed that despite "an ocean
of information," much of it can't be trusted.

"The ability to provide credible information is part of
our franchise," she said, and newsrooms always will rely
on editing. Newsrooms may have to modify the workflow
and reallocate the workforce, she said, but journalists don't
have to "throw away our good judgment and journalistic
values as we move into this age."

Dunlap read a prediction by Steve Outing from the textbook
she wrote with Jane Harrigan, "The Editorial Eye":

"As communications technology marches forward, consumers
are getting their news in a variety of new ways. It
will be the copy editor's job to keep the content flowing
in all those directions ... Copy editing always has been a
vital, if underappreciated, role in a news organization. In
the coming decade the copy editor's importance - and I
daresay, stature - will rise."

Moos hoped that Outing is right because much online
content is not edited.

"The Internet part of the industry is maturing," Moos
said. "In its infancy, people weren't surprised to see typos,
and they didn't necessarily point them out or consider
them notable. Over the years, we saw more and more emails
from people who were disturbed because a name
was misspelled or because there was a grammatical error
or because there was another mistake."

Few online operations have corrections policies, but
Moos predicted that as reader expectations mature and
online journalists become more professionally involved,
such standards would be developed.

The panelists and participants agreed that training is
key to bringing copy editors along as newsgathering and
editing change. Sites such as poynter.org offer a great deal
of content aimed at copy editors. The copy desk role is
changing, and it's important that news organizations plan
for it and not just let it happen to copy editors.

"We all know how critical copy editors are to our industry's
survival," Dori J. Maynard said during the conference
wrap-up, "so I hope as we move forward, we can
work together to remind the industry of that."